Australian Financial Review chief political correspondent

Malcolm Turnbull acknowledges the need to play it down the middle. Photo: Nic Walker

THE former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull says the Republican failure at this week's US election was a lesson to all political parties against pandering towards extremist views.

Mr Turnbull said on Friday that, from a Republican perspective, Tuesday's election was not unloseable and the Democrat President, Barack Obama, was ''incredibly vulnerable'' given the state of the US economy.

Yet Mr Obama easily beat his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, while in Congress, the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and held station in the House of Representatives, where they command a majority.

Mr Turnbull, the leading moderate voice in the Coalition, said the US election was a salient reminder that elections were won in the middle. The Republicans had paid for the influence of the Tea Party, the arch-conservative wing of the party.

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''The lessons for that for everybody is that if you run off to the extremes in politics, which is what the Republicans did, some of their candidates were saying some really bizarre things, which resulted in them losing,'' he said.

''You lose the credibility of the middle ground and elections are won in the middle ground.''

Mr Turnbull said it was disturbing for the Republicans that Mr Romney received fewer votes than Mr Obama's Republican rival in 2008, John McCain.

Mr Turnbull has been critical in the past of Liberal colleagues who, for example, reject climate change science. He was also the first Liberal to condemn the remarks of Liberal senator Cory Bernardi that legalising same-sex marriage could lead to sanctioning bestiality.

But he did not believe the Liberals under Tony Abbott were straying down the same path as the Republicans.

''We are always a party that is focused on the centre, on the sensible centre,'' he said.

Labor has been accusing Mr Abbott of having Tea Party tendencies, especially on climate change and the economy. It too will target the political middle in the lead-up to next year's election. In part, it will borrow the tactics used by the US Democrats.

The Prime Minister's senior strategist, John McTernan, met Mr Obama's lead pollster, Joel Benenson, in New York recently while Julia Gillard was attending the United Nations General Assembly.

It is understood Mr Benenson counselled that middle-ground voters do not like being lectured. Consequently, Labor will target the middle ground with what it regards as a facts-based campaign, enabling people to make up their own minds. By contrast, Labor believes Mr Abbott is prone to lecturing voters.

Another tactic will be to define Mr Abbott in negative terms, as the Obama camp did with Mr Romney.

Mr Abbott said on Friday that voters did not want to see ''the importation into this country of American-style political campaigning''.

''I don't believe the Australian people want to see the nasty personal side, which sometimes came into the American campaign, coming into our campaign,'' he said.